- Economy : Environment : eBusiness -

As Forbes reports, the uber-cool techie news site digg.com, is really taking off. If you're unfamiliar with it, check it out. There is plenty of chatter about digg.com in the blogosphere.

Will digg survive its popularity, or be a victim of its own success? digg users are asking themselves this very question, as the community undergoes some growing pains. Indeed, Yahoo!'s new darling, del.icio.us was down this morning, some suspect due to its very popularity.

digg need not remain the exclusive domain of the techno elite. digg's innovative social system for finding and sorting useful information (news in particular) can and should be extended to a broader audience. After all, there are "elite" in every domain of knowledge and digg's system of inviting users to submit, and more importantly, rate incoming content is an idea that transports nicely.

digg's users are their own editors - and most agree that the wisdom of the crowd is working pretty well.

Yet digg seems pretty narrowly focused on its current community - not a bad thing. It may be difficult for them to move into very many other content areas. So, if digg won't put all the world's newspaper editors out of work, who will?

Judging from the comments on digg.com, some people are quite concerned that the community will be co-opted. And rightly so. Marketers are always dreaming up new ways to inject themselves into otherwise authentic communication.